Private First Class Bradley Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison Wednesday morning for transmitting government documents to the antisecrecy website WikiLeaks, and he received a dishonorable discharge. The trove of documents fell within four categories: videos, incident reports from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, information on detainees at Guantanamo and thousands of State Department cables. WSJ reporter Julian E. Barnes compiled this list of the top documents for an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal July 31, 2013.

Video

The most important video showed an U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Iraq firing on a group of people who turned out to include journalists from Reuters. The video was edited by WikiLeaks and called “Collateral Murder.” In Pfc. Manning’s trial, the defense and prosecution have offered different theories of when the video was sent to WikiLeaks. Pfc. Manning’s lawyers have said the material in the video had been previously released to the public; prosecutors said that militants could learn about American military tactics by watching the video.

‘War Logs’

The second batch of documents provided by Pfc. Manning that WikiLeaks published were incident reports from Afghanistan and Iraq. WikiLeaks called them the “War Logs” and said they showed there were much larger numbers of civilian casualties than the U.S. had previously reported. The Iraq war logs were released first and WikiLeaks didn’t redact the names of people mentioned in the incident reports, prompting U.S. officials to charge the organization had put the lives of people who had supported the American military in jeopardy.

More care was taken to redact names in subsequent releases, but U.S. officials continued to maintain that the release of hundreds of thousands of reports hurt the war effort. In the trial of Pfc. Manning, prosecutors said a copy of the Afghanistan incident reports was found in Osama bin Laden‘s Pakistan compound after the raid that killed him. Pfc. Manning’s defenders say the release of the low-level reports could not have hurt ongoing operations but did provide the public with a better understanding of the war.

Guantanamo

Pfc. Manning has also been accused of providing WikiLeaks with documents related to the detainees at Guantanamo. Those documents have received comparatively little attention, because most of the information in them had been publicly released by the government in other documents.

State Department Cables

The largest trove of documents Pfc. Manning provided to WikiLeaks was hundreds of thousands of State Department cables. WikiLeaks has released many of the documents on their website but didn’t issue a blanket release as they had with the military incident reports. Still, because some newspapers have a complete archive of the documents, the most important information in the trove has been made public.

U.S. officials have said the release of the cables was the most damaging leak by Pfc. Manning, causing diplomatic headaches around the globe as the private stances of allied nations—which sometimes differed from public comments—were laid bare. Officials have said the release of documents has made some nations more hesitant to share intelligence or work with the U.S. Defenders of Pfc. Manning said the release of the cables has provided important information about international affairs, and has helped prod democratic movements in the Middle East.

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